Alton, England, where John Murray was born in 1741 to an upper-class
family, was a rural market town some fifty miles southwest of London.*
Alton was dominated by the Anglican church most people attended, just
as John’s childhood was dominated by his strict Calvinist father whose
fears for John’s soul led him to beat and isolate his son. As a
consequence, while a child, John perceived religion as a gloomy means
to control people’s behavior. He later wrote in his autobiography, “I
believed that I had nothing to hope, but every thing to fear, both from
my Creator, and my father; and these soul-appalling considerations, by
forcing a conclusion, that I was but making provision for alternate
torture, threw a cloud over innocent enjoyment.” Throughout his life,
John suffered from depression.

John was a bright but often inattentive student at Alton’s Free School,
where he made friends easily and exhibited what his father considered a
disturbingly outgoing nature. John continued his schooling in Cork,
Ireland, where his father moved his wife and their family of nine
children when John was eleven. In Cork, John encountered Methodists, at
that time a sect of Anglicans whose more social, musical gatherings
were a welcome departure from what John had known of organized
religion. The Methodists were evangelicals, held religious revivals,
and reached out to people from all walks of life in a radical departure
from the more solemn worship style and social hierarchy of the
religious traditions of John’s earlier years. John Wesley, the
Methodists’ inspiring leader, was despised by the standing Anglican
clergy for seducing parishioners away from the established church. He
was threatened, sometimes physically attacked, and singularly effective
as a preacher of change. He was also an important early role model for
John.

After John Wesley came to know the teenaged John Murray he entrusted
him with a religious education class of forty boys, encouraging his
protégé to lead them in song, prayer, and introspective discussions
about their spiritual development. Wesley started John on a path to the
ministry, and many Methodists predicted that he would become a “burning
and a shining light.” At about the same time, an Anglican clergyman
also observed John’s leanings toward religion and asked John’s father
to allow John to live with the clergyman’s family while he tutored John
for college. Unfortunately, John later felt, his father’s refusal to
relinquish control of his son denied him a college education.

Meanwhile, a Methodist family in Cork, the Littles, had befriended John
and encouraged him to read the books in their extensive library, an
exciting prospect because John’s father had forbidden him to read
anything but the Bible or approved religious texts. But now, as a young
man, John was free to embark on a self-directed literary
education—something he would have in common with his future wife.
Judith Sargent.

When John was eighteen, he started preaching to large audiences in
Cork. He soon attracted enemies and experienced the kind of animosity
John Wesley had endured. He also suffered personal losses when an early
love interest broke his heart and his closest male friend, one of the
Littles’ sons, died. John’s father died when John was nineteen, after a
lengthy illness, and John, as the oldest son, was now expected to
manage the Murray family. John felt unable to discipline his siblings
as his father had done, nor was he comfortable with the role of
provider. He accepted the Littles’ invitation to live with them as one
of their own children. Before long, the Littles encouraged John to
marry their daughter, a prospect that did not interest him. As it was,
the Littles’ heirs objected to John’s presence, fearing he would
inherit what was rightfully theirs.

These factors, combined with John’s growing doubts about John Wesley’s
theology, propelled him into a state of despair. He was almost
suicidal, he recounted in his autobiography, yet, believing there was a
higher purpose in life for him, he decided to leave Ireland. As John
wrote in recalling the sad departure from his family, his grandmother
told him, “You are, my dear child, under the guidance of an Omnipotent
Power; God has designed you for himself; you are a chosen instrument to
give light to your fellow men.”

On his way to England, John spent a few weeks in Limerick where he
heard a sermon by the itinerant evangelical Methodist preacher George
Whitefield. John admired the preacher’s nondenominational, welcoming
style, which seemed more agreeable than Wesley’s more rigid ministry.
John conversed with him afterward, and, intrigued by Whitefield’s
independent spirit, he resolved to renew their acquaintance at
Whitefield’s Tabernacle in London. Meanwhile, when Whitefield was
called out of town, John filled the pulpits where Whitefield had been
invited to preach—a high honor for such a young man, but John was
already a talented evangelical.

John was on the verge of his twentieth birthday when he arrived in
England’s southwest port of Pill, making his way on foot to Bristol.
There, he encountered a group of Methodists who befriended him and
urged him to stay—a recurring pattern throughout John’s life when he
visited new communities. But on to London he went, where he quickly
made friends and enjoyed that city’s social life of parties, concerts,
and the theater while he contemplated what sort of work to pursue.
Before long, John ran out of the money he had received from the Littles
and he was consumed by an overwhelming sense of failure. He had to pay
off his debts, however, and he secured a position in a textile factory.

John despised the drudgery that filled his days, but in the evenings
his love for religion drove him to George Whitefield’s Tabernacle. John
also found himself attending services elsewhere in London, wherever he
knew a popular preacher was speaking. After a short time, Whitefield
asked John to preach at the Tabernacle and his talent quickly became
the subject of conversations in London. John fell in love with a young
woman who came to hear him preach, Eliza Neale, and they eventually
married despite her family’s strong objections to their daughter
marrying a Methodist.

Like most of their Methodist friends, John and Eliza were well aware
that James Relly, a Welsh preacher, was in London lecturing on
universal salvation. As a good Methodist, John despised Relly and
refused to hear him. He was even asked to “save” a young Methodist
woman whom Relly had been able to tempt away from the Tabernacle. John
was surprisingly ineffective; her arguments were persuasive. Finally,
John decided to read Relly’s book for himself and he borrowed a copy of
Union, or, A Treatise of the Consanguinity and Affinity between Christ and His Church. Relly’s interpretation of the scriptures made sense to him.

Soon after, John and Eliza heard James Relly preach and they were both
profoundly affected. “The veil was taken from my heart,” John wrote in
his autobiography, explaining,

It was clear, as any testimony in divine revelation, that Christ Jesus,
died for all, for the sins of the whole world, for every man, &c.;
... and that every one, for whom Christ died must finally be saved ...
We now attended public worship, not only as a duty ... but it became
our pleasure, our consolation, and our highest enjoyment. We began to
feed upon the truth as it is in Jesus, and every discovery we made
filled us with unutterable transport.... I conceived, if I had an
opportunity of conversing with the whole world, the whole world would
be convinced. It might truly have been said, that we had a taste of
heaven below.

The Methodists expelled John from the Tabernacle.

A New Life in America

John’s contentment with life ended abruptly when his infant son died
and Eliza’s health deteriorated. John moved her to the country, hiring
nurses and renting a comfortable cottage. But his desperate efforts
were not enough. Eliza died, leaving John heartbroken and debt-ridden.
Once again, John was overcome by a sense of personal failure. James
Relly was the only friend who could comfort him, and he encouraged John
to join him as a preacher of universal salvation. Instead, John decided
to “close his life in solitude” in America after hearing stories about
the New World’s independent spirit and plentiful resources. With no
connections or plans, John boarded the brig Hand-in-Hand bound for New
York and served as its supercargo, or business manager.

Before reaching its destination, however, the Hand-in-Hand ran aground
on a sandbar off the New Jersey coast. Because the crew required
additional provisions, John went ashore in search of food. By chance he
encountered an elderly farmer named Thomas Potter who had recently
built a meetinghouse on his property for itinerant preachers. Potter
was waiting for one to come who embraced universal salvation, as he
did, and thus there was no doubt in Potter’s mind that God had sent
John Murray for this purpose. He urged John to preach, but John
refused, preferring to leave his past behind and sail for New York as
planned.

“The wind will never change, sir, until you have delivered to us, in
that meeting-house, a message from God,” Potter warned John as John
told the story in his autobiography. The wind remained calm for days.
John was enough of a believer in God’s intervening hand to relent, and
he delivered a sermon on Sunday, September 30, 1770, to the friends
Potter had gathered. He felt his sense of calling and purpose return.

While Thomas Potter implored John to remain in New Jersey, John was
invited to speak in cities and towns in New York, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
He had to go. While he was attracting opposition from established
clergy wherever he went, the public was resonating to John’s powerful
preaching style; his oratory was as effective as any they had heard. In
1774, while John was lecturing in Boston, a gentleman from Gloucester,
Massachusetts, named Winthrop Sargent paid him a visit and asked him to
preach in that distant fishing and trading port. John agreed, writing
in his autobiography:

November 3d, I repaired to Gloucester, and was received by a very few
warm-hearted Christians. The mansion-house—the heart, of the then head
of the Sargent family, with his highly accomplished, and most exemplary
lady, were open to receive me. I had travelled from Maryland to New
Hampshire, without meeting a single individual, who appeared to have
the smallest idea of what I esteemed the truth, as it is in Jesus; but
to my great astonishment, there were a few persons, dwellers in that
remote place, upon whom the light of the gospel had more than dawned.
The writings of Mr. Relly were not only in their hands but in their
hearts.

John met Winthrop Sargent’s daughter Judith Sargent Stevens that day, an encounter whose significance he could not have known.

John decided to make Gloucester his home, but protests to his ministry
arose. In 1774, the Reverend Samuel Chandler of First Parish Church
preached and published a sermon against John in the Essex Gazette. In 1775, Gloucesterians read Boston’s Reverend Andrew Croswell’s pamphlet titled Mr.
Murray unmask’d: in which among other things, is shewn, that his
doctrine of universal salvation, is inimical to virtue, and productive
of all manner of wickedness; and that Christians of all denominations
ought to be on their guard against it. Eventually, in 1775, First
Parish’s new minister, the Reverend Eli Forbes, addressed letters
threatening excommunication to seventeen of John’s followers including
Winthrop Sargent, his brother Epes Sargent, and Judith Sargent Stevens.
The town even attempted to have John removed as a vagrant, until
Winthrop Sargent deeded him a piece of his own land, thus making John a
legal freeholder.

These were tense, volatile days in Gloucester, as patriotic fervor
swept through the community. Merchants like Epes Sargent were accused
of disloyalty and forced to leave Gloucester. John Murray was named an
English spy by some, but friends from Rhode Island asked him to serve
as a chaplain in the Continental Army. He accepted, hoping his military
service would squash further charges of treason. John encountered
clerical opposition in the Army as well, but General George Washington
chose to expand his service rather than release him.

After less than a year of service as an Army chaplain, John caught a
potentially deadly fever in camp and was forced to return home to
Gloucester. Once there, he was instrumental in raising funds to help
Gloucester’s citizens who were suffering from the closure of their
port, though these benevolent activities did little to mollify the
First Parish clergy. Instead, the church leadership’s campaign against
the small group of Universalists in Gloucester escalated in 1778 when
Reverend Forbes followed through on his threat to expel them from
church membership—an act of potentially enormous legal and social
consequence for the outcasts. But instead of renouncing their chosen
faith, the Gloucester Universalists signed Articles of Association in
1779 to create their own religious society: the Independent Church of
Christ. They built their own meeting house on land owned by Winthrop
Sargent and dedicated the small building on Christmas Day 1780, calling
John as their pastor.

The next several years saw John Murray and the Gloucester Universalists
involved in a series of legal disputes with local authorities. Because
the Universalists had defied the law and refused to pay taxes to First
Parish Church after forming their Association, in 1782 the town seized
articles of value from Universalist believers to sell at public
auction. In 1783, John brought the Universalists’ case before the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court by arguing for the legal right to
create a religious organization independent from the established
church. Eventually, in 1785 and 1786, the court ruled in favor of the
Universalists, thereby allowing them to realize a monumental victory
for all American citizens.

The Universalists’ victory was short-lived, however. In 1787, First
Parish challenged John’s authority to perform the marriage ceremony and
the Universalists advised John to leave Gloucester for his safety. He
decided to return to England to visit his mother whom he had not seen
for eighteen years. But before he left, he wrote from Boston Harbor to
the recently widowed Judith Sargent Stevens and asked her to marry him.

Sailing for England in January 1788, John had no idea if he would be
reunited with Gloucester or Judith again. His apprehension gave way to
a triumphant return to the country of his birth, however, where he was
frequently asked to preach and dubbed “the most popular preacher in the
United States.” After a few months, John received word that the
Universalists had successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature
to declare his ministry legal and he boarded a ship to Boston, sharing
his passage with John and Abigail Adams who were returning from an
ambassadorial mission. The Adamses heard John preach on the ship and
struck up a friendship that would last for many years.

When John arrived in Boston, Governor John Hancock hosted a reception
in his honor. While his departure from Gloucester had been a necessary
but painful decision, John’s absence, and the Universalists’ petitions,
had finally, after many years of opposition, solidified John’s stature
as a beloved preacher of the Gospel. His hard-won success was crowned
that fall when he married Judith Sargent Stevens in Salem,
Massachusetts, and participated in a second, more traditional
ordination service in the Gloucester meetinghouse on Christmas Day. The
Universalists published notices of their pastor’s calling in newspapers
throughout New England to thwart further challenges to John’s ministry.
Truly, 1789 was a new beginning for John Murray.

The Move to Boston

John and Judith began married life together in Judith’s Middle Street
home in Gloucester where John had been lodging for many years. He
continued to travel, as his health allowed, to help Universalists in
other communities organize their own societies. Before long, Judith was
pregnant and John prayed for a safe delivery. Perhaps he would have a
second chance to realize a fulfilling family life. But, tragically,
their son, Fitz Winthrop, was stillborn. John feared for Judith’s life,
as she lay ill for many weeks. But she recovered, and the two of them
journeyed to Philadelphia in 1790 where John helped organize the first
national Universalist convention and represented the New England states
during the convention’s deliberations. On John and Judith’s return trip
to Gloucester, John presented the convention’s resolutions to President
George Washington in New York (the seat of the new American government)
to explain, as a courtesy, the growing Universalist movement in America.

Back home, in 1791, Judith gave birth to a healthy daughter they called
Julia Maria. Both parents were ecstatic. Simultaneously, the Boston
Universalists were urging John to accept a position as their minister.
With a new family, he needed to increase his income and likely was
intrigued by the idea of living in the New England “Metropolis” with
its intellectual, literary, religious, and political activity. John’s
congregations agreed to allow him to divide his time between Gloucester
and Boston, but, eventually, the thirty-seven-mile distance became
impractical. John established his friend the Reverend Thomas Jones of
Wales in the Gloucester pulpit in 1793, and on October 23, the First
Universalist Church in Boston installed John as their pastor. In 1794,
John moved his family to an elegant townhouse at Franklin Place in
Boston.

John’s years in Boston were filled with service to his congregation,
travels to advise emerging Universalist congregations around New
England, and days of recovery from exhaustion when he returned home.
The Boston Universalists were slow to pay his salary, unfortunately,
and John was often embarrassed by the state of his finances. Judith’s
literary career, meanwhile, was blossoming after almost ten years of
publishing poems, essays, and plays. Her 1798 book, The Gleaner, sold
well and bolstered the family coffers temporarily. But money was
scarce, and John found himself accepting an increasing number of
invitations from far-off congregations in order to supplement his
income.

In 1798, before departing for one such engagement in Philadelphia, John
had arranged for the young minister Hosea Ballou to preach in his
Boston pulpit. John had no idea that Ballou would promulgate a theology
blasphemous to Universalists in his church. In other Universalist
pulpits, Ballou was in the forefront of a shift toward Unitarianism
that would ultimately succeed—a new interpretation of the meaning of
Christ’s death and his relationship to mankind. John, however, was
immovably Trinitarian, and would never have allowed such ideas to be
preached in his church. In fact, Ballou’s theological views caused
serious distress and division within the Boston Universalist
congregation when he spoke in 1799. When John finally returned home,
he was so ill from a tumor in his side he could only minimally calm his
parishioners. Division remained, and Universalism continued to change
throughout Boston and far beyond.

In 1809, his relentless efforts on behalf of Universalism ended
unexpectedly when he suffered a stroke that resulted in paralysis to
the right side of his body. Although his mind was alert and he could
speak, John was bedridden for the rest of his life—no longer able to
preach, debate, travel, or provide for his family. John’s congregation
hired a nurse and sent daily “watchers” to help move and attend to him.
Yet as ill as he was, John insisted on shaking the hand of Boston’s new
Universalist minister, his friend the Reverend Edward Mitchell of New
York, during his installation ceremony. Perhaps, he hoped, under Edward
Mitchell, the Boston church would return to Rellyan Universalism and
halt the intrusion of Unitarianism. When Mitchell departed for his
native New York in 1812, the Universalists installed the Reverend Paul
Dean, a conservative minister whose leadership, they hoped, would
appeal to John.

The Preacher’s Legacy

John confessed to Judith that he felt “imprisoned” in his “helpless”
body. Judith’s letters describing his state of mind report that he
longed for an “escape” to the next world. But first, to reinforce the
original ideas of Universalism that had strayed so far from James
Relly’s 1759 book Union,
John asked Judith to help him edit and publish his writings. He would
at least leave behind a written testament of the truth as he saw it.
John published Letters and Sketches of Sermons in 1812, hoping to generate income along with renewed interest in Rellyan Universalism.

As his investments failed during the early days of another war with
Great Britain, John feared for the safety of his family. His
frustration reached new heights as American troops arrived in Boston to
defend its port. The British had already set fire to the capital city,
Washington. What if Boston suffered a similar fate? How could John care
for his loved ones—and, equally important, how would his lack of
mobility endanger their lives?

Eventually, tensions with Great Britain subsided and Judith and John
hoped to resume their peaceful lives together. But on September 3,
1815, John Murray died at the age of seventy-five after almost six
years of painful incapacitation. A lifetime of useful service to God
and to the public had ended. The leaders of his former congregations
organized two services for him—one in Gloucester and the other in
Boston where, after a long procession through the city, John was
interred in the Sargent family tomb at Granary Burying Ground.

Following John’s death, Universalist friends asked Judith to complete
and publish his autobiography. John had abandoned the project in 1774
when he settled in Gloucester. Hoping to preserve her husband’s legacy,
Judith published Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray
in 1816. Reflecting the posthumous creation of John’s autobiography,
the earlier parts, from John’s original manuscript, are highly detailed
and self-reflective, while the later sections, Judith’s additions, are
a brief summary of the events of John’s life from 1775–1815. Only three
sentences describe their lives together as husband and wife:

Mr. Murray’s last marriage was the result of a strong and holy
friendship, founded upon the rock of ages; and, originating in devout
admiration of redeeming love, it is fervently hoped, and unwaveringly
believed, that this union will be perfected in another and a better
world. One son, and one daughter, were the offspring of this marriage.
The son surrendered his innocent life in the birth; the daughter still
survives, the prop, and consolation of her widowed mother.

Since John Murray’s death, others have sought to honor him as well,
including the United States General Convention of Universalists, which,
in 1837, moved John’s body to the new and prestigious Mount Auburn
Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and erected a handsome monument
to him. (At Granary Burying Ground, no marker or inscription had
identified his final resting place.)

In addition, seventy-one years after John’s death, in 1886, the newly
formed Murray Grove Association purchased the property in New Jersey
where John first arrived and erected memorials to the story of John
Murray and Thomas Potter. Today, the Murray Grove Conference Center
hosts the John Murray Distinguished Lecture Series and publishes its
proceedings.

John’s autobiography has been reissued many times over the years, with
each edition adding new insights and additional material. In 1920, on
the 150th anniversary of John’s arrival in America, Frederick A. Bisbee
published From Good Luck to Gloucester,
the first biography of John Murray. In succeeding years, scholars have
included John in histories of Universalism, Gloucester, and progressive
religion in America (see “Resources” section).

Although John and Judith Sargent Murray have no living direct
descendants, John Murray’s Universalist descendants abound. The
Universalist church in Gloucester, the Independent Christian Church,
preserves his legacy through programs and exhibits. The Sargent House
Museum, John’s former home on Middle Street, is open to the public as a
historic house museum. Although Universalists and Unitarians joined
together in 1961 to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, the
history of Universalism and its early leaders has received renewed
interest. The New Massachusetts Universalist Convention was founded in
1998 to host conferences, publish, and generally “fan the flame of
Universalism in New England and Beyond.” Most recently, Universalist
enthusiasts established a Universalist Heritage Center in Winchester,
New Hampshire, in 2006.

For almost two hundred years, scholars, ministers, and Universalists
have variously referred to John Murray as the singular Father or
Founder of American Universalism. But to do so is, in fact, a
disservice to the dozens of disparate communities where the message of
universal salvation had independently taken hold even before John
Murray’s arrival in 1770. Perhaps the most fitting title is, simply, as
the historian of Universalism, Russell Miller, suggests, Founder of
Organized Universalism in America. It is also accurate to state that
because of John Murray’s steadfast, inspiring, strategic work, he
changed American religious life for the better—as he used to say, from
“hell” to “hope.” He would charge his congregations to join him in
spreading the “good news of Universalism” by preaching,

Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country. Give
the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism,
something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but
uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and
understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not
Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their
theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of
God.

*An interesting story about John Murray’s ancestry is described in
Letters 615 and 632. While his maternal ancestors were from English
minor nobility, John’s paternal family was comprised of Scots who were
killed in the 1745 uprising, and French Catholic aristocrats who
converted to Protestantism. If John’s father and grandmother had been
willing to renounce their faith, they stood to inherit a small fortune.
They refused, but, many years later, John appears to have had the
opportunity to collect what his family had been denied.

Independent scholar and author Bonnie Hurd Smith is the
president and CEO of History Smiths,
a marketing company that works with businesses to incorporate history -- their
own and their community's -- into their branding, marketing, and community
outreach to attract customers, boost customer loyalty, and secure a high status
reputation in the communities they serve.